Prospect X is drafted; identity is revealed (1:23)ESPN’s Kalyn Kahler set out to find the most overlooked player in the NFL draft, better known as Prospect X. His identity is now revealed and he’s headed to Jacksonville. (1:23)
But the family room was getting loud, and as the fifth round stretched on, he needed some quiet to take the flood of calls coming from his agent and from coaches with two NFL clubs that brought him in on one of their 30 predraft visits.
X has received so many calls and texts that he’s starting to lose track of time and space. The club with multiple fifth-round picks that his agent thought was his most likely landing spot took another player at his position, so they are now unlikely to draft him.
But then X’s phone rings. It’s that club. When he sees the number on the screen, he thinks this could be The Call.
It’s immediately clear that the head coach isn’t calling to draft X. He’s calling to remind X of the bond between them, a connection formed on X’s visit. He’s calling to tell him how well they fit together and how much they’d love to have him in their city — that is, if they can’t draft him with their final pick.
X is appreciative but frustrated. Thoughts of going undrafted invade his mind as the sixth round of the draft creeps along.
Upstairs, his girlfriend, Hannah, can’t stand the waiting. She has her arms around X’s mom, Renae. One of X’s grandmothers stands at the door to the basement stairs, straining to hear his conversations. His aunt walks by the door on her way to get something.
Hannah and Renae both stand up from the couch at the same time to head downstairs. Renae surrenders and sends Hannah as the family representative to see what’s going on.
X’s aunt is wrong. X is actually having a really hard time deciding between the head coach’s club (Club A) and Club B, in the same division. If he goes undrafted, he’s leaning toward Club B, because he feels a stronger connection to the defensive coordinator, who spent a lot of time with him on his visit and has been in touch with him almost every day since. He’d also love to learn from their famous star pass rusher.
Then Renae hears X raise his deep voice. She can’t quite make out his exact words, but his tone has turned and the conversation sounds spirited. The draft is now well into the sixth round, and she’s worried.
She’d asked him earlier that day if he was OK with going undrafted, and he told her no. He wanted that seal of approval, he wanted to achieve his goal and he wanted to do it for all of his family supporting him. Bottles of champagne are chilling in the fridge — she’d bought them earlier, hoping they’d have a chance to make a toast.
Jerry and X’s older brother Adam make it downstairs just in time to hear X say, “If a kicker gets drafted before me, I am going to lose my s—!”
X is blunt, and known for telling it like it is. Adam reminds X it’s all politics at this point, but he feels proud of his little brother, because that fiery attitude is what has taken him this far in football.
Thankfully, X doesn’t see the television screen when the Packers draft a kicker with the last pick of the sixth round because he’s back on the phone with Club A.
This time, it’s the defensive coordinator. They’d thought X was a lock to sign with them after the draft, and now they hear he’s leading toward Club B? The defensive coordinator makes his last-ditch plea, similar to that of the head coach.
“I would love to play for you too,” X says. “So you guys should just pick me. I’m a great player and I’m gonna be great for your locker room.”
But Club A isn’t going to draft another edge rusher with its final pick, and not when a player at a valuable position is surprisingly still on the board. Before the defensive coordinator can change X’s mind, a Jacksonville area code interrupts.
X has heard directly from the Jaguars only once that day. A personnel staffer sent him a long text with multiple bullet points selling the team and the Jacksonville player lifestyle — a blatant free agent recruiting pitch. X thinks this call is going to be a lot more of that.
“Hey, we’re on the clock in the seventh round, pick 233, and we’re going to select you to be a Jacksonville Jaguar and we can’t wait for you to come kick everybody’s ass,” a voice on the other end says.
X has been emotionally stable all day, but those words, Select You To Be A Jacksonville Jaguar, are the password that unlocks a vault of tears.
Six seconds pass by in silence. X is so overwhelmed that he doesn’t know who he’s talking to and he can’t form words.
When X’s name flashes on the ESPN broadcast minutes later, his family cheers. He tries to bury his face in his black T-shirt, then rests his head on his tattooed arms and cries again.
AS MANY READERS correctly guessed on X, and as one general manager speculated in his postdraft news conference, Prospect X is Zach Durfee, edge rusher, Washington, former Division II walk-on at the University of Sioux Falls.
Despite playing a premier position for a Power 4 team and being on Washington’s 2023 roster that went to the national championship game, Durfee was overlooked because he played in only 17 games over three seasons. He sat out the better part of two seasons because of red tape (he was denied an NCAA two-time transfer waiver in 2023) and injuries (he dislocated his elbow, had surgery for turf toe, and then dislocated the other elbow).
He wasn’t recruited to play football because he’d done a sideways flip that “he had no intention of landing” at a captain’s practice the summer before his senior football season and broke his leg on said landing. Durfee still doesn’t like to discuss his freak accident because he’s convinced he would have received a football offer that year if he’d just been able to play — at quarterback.
That spring, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted life, and threatened to eliminate most of his freshman basketball season. So Durfee withdrew from Gustavus Adolphus and enrolled at North Dakota State, thinking he would have a more normal college experience at a bigger school.
But nothing was normal that year, and Durfee missed the routine and purpose of playing sports, so he spent a lot of time lifting weights at the school’s rec center. A strength coach noticed this 6-foot-4 kid who spent so much time in the gym, and told him he should join the football team.
Durfee tried to walk on to the Bisons’ football team as a tight end, but the team wouldn’t take him, citing pandemic restrictions.
“He was just down in the dumps,” Renae says. “The COVID year was hard, just feeling kind of lost and just very different, and he didn’t handle that as well as others.”
His parents gave him one semester to figure out what he wanted to do next. That’s when he sent out his basketball highlights to small college football recruiting coordinators in his area and walked on to the University of Sioux Falls football team for the fall of 2021.
Zach had always had size and rare athletic ability, but up to that point, he hadn’t performed to his athletic potential. Something was missing.
Jerry said he once challenged Zach to play better when he coached him in fifth-grade tackle football. It was the only time he played defensive end before college. “Oh, that poor person on the other side of the line after I [did] that, it shocked me,” Jerry said. “We would see glimpses of that throughout his athletic career, but it just wasn’t that consistent.”
“He texted my husband and I that he wanted to quit,” Renae says. “And we’re like, ‘No. No, you don’t get to. You have to finish this out.’ And then the next week, he was scout team defensive player of the week, and it’s like something clicked in him. He bought into what was going on, and he took off from there.”
“It was a killer instinct thing,” Adam says. “When that flip switched in him, I think it had a lot to do with him stepping away from sports and realizing I really want to be an athlete again.”
Zach hadn’t played football in two years, and hadn’t played defensive end since childhood, so he redshirted that season and spent the year developing into the best scout-team edge rusher.
“He did not know how to get into a stance, did not know how to read an offensive lineman for his key,” says Luke Olson, his position coach at Sioux Falls. “… You could just see him watching scout team film during the year, just figuring it out day by day, week by week, and he started winning a good amount of reps.”
In the 2022 season opener at Minnesota State Moorhead, Durfee’s first college game, he had four sacks on only 23 snaps.
When the Cougars played their crosstown rivalry trophy game against Augustana, where Zach’s older brother Adam had played baseball, he had three sacks and was named the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference defensive player of the week.
“From a measurement standpoint, he translated to a different level of football,” his then-head coach Jon Anderson says.
In January 2023, the NCAA still had transfer restrictions in place. The NCAA allowed student-athletes to transfer one time without having to sit a “year in residence” before becoming eligible, but Durfee knew when he entered the portal that the NCAA considered him a two-time transfer. His next college would be his third, meaning he would need the NCAA to grant him a waiver to allow him to play that season.
But neither he nor the bigger colleges he visited thought that would be a problem because Durfee never played a sport at North Dakota State and wasn’t recruited to play a sport there, so his transfer to Sioux Falls had nothing to do with athletic competition. Plus, Sioux Falls fired the coaching staff and Durfee’s freshman year had been the COVID-19-impacted 2020 season.
Durfee visited Washington partially because Anderson had coached with then-Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer when DeBoer was the head coach at Sioux Falls. But the small-town boy instantly hated Seattle when he arrived for his visit. “All I’m seeing is skyscrapers or big, big buildings on the drive over there,” he says. “It’s all city. And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is not the place for me.'”